BlizzCon 2013 – Diablo III: Reaper of Souls Preview Panel Transcript

Shely: Alright. So we have seen some new stuff from Adventure Mode and now I’m gonna talk to you about some of the new monsters we have got in Reaper of Souls. So let’s start in Westmarch. In Westmarch we got the angel of death coming into a city and wiping out all of its inhabitants. It’s been sieged, too.

Shely: And so we wanna have monsters that tell that story. By their design. By what they look like and by what they do.

So first of, we got the SUMMONER. This is a monster that stands in the crossroads of city streets, it defiles the ground under it, and raises ghosts up out of the cobblestones.

Shely: Malthael has also sent in his DEATH MAIDEN. Now these are his lieutenants. They wield their giant scythes, cut the heads off of the Westmarch defenders and reencarnates them as ghosts and skeletons to fight the player.

Shely: Now we got the PUNISHER. This is the heavy shock troop of Malthael’s army. He leaps on the streets, stuns enemies around his area of arrival and beats his fist together, smashing them and doing tremendous damage.

Shely: These guys all work together to tell a story of a place that’s been invaded and overrun and when the player enters, they are gonna need to beat back these forces. Let’s take a look at the player doing that, just now.

( Gameplay video)

Pretty Cool. Now we gonna take a look at some of my favorite monsters. We are gonna do a little bit of a sneak peek. We are going to show you some guys from the Bloodmarch — one of the other zones.

You can see here some of the concept art for the Boggan Trapper and Brute we talked about.

We are gonna start with the Boggit. And this little guy, he is my favorite. He rolls around, he’s little bit cute, he lives underground and you gonna see a ton of these guys, there, ahh and he’s a part of a family.

You might remember the Fallen from Act I. Well, the Bloodmarch has a family, as well.

The next member is the Bogan Trapper. He actually goes out and hunts, and throws his traps on the ground, to slow his prey; and he fires a little blowdart, to incapacitate them.

And then, we’ll look at the Bogan Brute. Now this is the king of the Bloodmarch. He goes where he pleases. He kicks the other enemies out of the way.

The little boggits feel his wrath on a regular — if we look at these guys together, we got a place that really comes to life and feels like a real world environment. Just take a look here.

(Short video of gameplay)

These guys are persistent.

( Audience Applauds )

So when we create a monster, we think about several different things. We talk about, how they come upon the screen. How they spawn. What they do and how they die. And we will get into how they die and what they do in a minute. I’m gonna talk a little bit about how they are introduced! and we have a particular junction called the Catacomb – which is a little bit later in the expansion.

And we really wanted to create a feeling in the player of the deep, dark area. It is foreboding. It have got a sense of threat, and you never know what’s going to be around the corner. So we took this little guy called the SCARAB and we said, well, can we just make it crawl out of everywhere? So you just never know where he is gonna show up, and let’s just put a ton of these guys in there! Ah you can see here the player wandering in.

( Gameplay video clip plays )

You can see a few of them at the start, but pretty soon they are a lot. That’s a lot of guys, now what you may — thanks! ( Laugh )

What you may not have noticed there is that the player actually walks through the SCARABS. This is new technology that we got. It allows us to put a tremendous number of guys on the screen without beating the player to get bound up and stuck — colliding with them.

( Audience Applauses )

So we will talk little bit more about some of these guys, and some of their behavior. I’m going to bring up Julian Love, our lead technical artist.